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Forum : The self-confidence trick

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WHEN I was in high school in the US, I joined the wrestling team. I weighed
about 150 pounds (68 kilograms) and so was not exactly a giant. But the coach
thought that if he put me up against much larger boys I would toughen up and
easily beat boys of my own size.

He was wrong. After several encounters with these wrestling Titans, I decided
to take up basketball. It was another mistake. The experience of these failures
was painful both physically and psychologically and sapped my confidence.

According to a report from the Association of Graduate Recruiters,
Skills for Graduates in the 21st Century (AGR, Cambridge, Autumn 1995),
self-confidence is an essential skill for success as a professional and, I
believe, in life. In order to have self-confidence, you have to have a certain
amount of success. The task must be set in such a way that the person attempting
it has a good chance of succeeding. Therefore he or she must have the necessary
skills and background knowledge. Once a student experiences some success, he or
she will have greater self-confidence and this will create a higher probability
of success. The difficulty of the task must not be set too high.

Yet, in the educational training of our scientists, how often do we set tasks
beyond our students’ capability? It happens all the time in my subject, physics.
In Britain, where I now teach, all students are required to take physics. But in
most secondary schools in the US, the teaching of physics is only attempted in
the final year, and then it is an option. This is also true in most Italian
schools. Physics is taught last because of the level of maths demanded by the
subject. I believe most of the students who study physics at school in Britain
do not have sufficient background knowledge to understand it.

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When the sciences were taught separately in Britain, the physics classes were
generally smaller and more motivated. The higher motivation came because the
secondary school students chose the subject themselves.

There’s more. Some educationalists seem to believe that standards are raised
by making exams more difficult. My wrestling coach reasoned along similar lines
when he set me against the giants. In my experience, a difficult exam weakens
confidence. In the present science exam at the GCSE level in Britain, a
candidate can correctly answer roughly two-thirds of the questions and still be
awarded an A grade. If students were told that they achieved a 60 per cent
result in a language exam they might easily come to the conclusion that they
inadequately understood the language and would more than likely not attempt it
at A level.

I was able to collect data from four of the examination boards for the summer
of 1995 for Science Double Award, in which students sit one science exam with
individual sections in biology, chemistry and physics, and for what is called
Coordinated Science (Double Award), in which the three sciences are more closely
integrated in one exam paper. (Both exams confer a “double award” on the pupils
that pass, so preventing the individual sciences from dominating exam time.)

The students could choose the degree of difficulty of their paper from
higher, lower and intermediate—a selection intended to make the paper
accessible to all students. The foundation paper was for students predicted to
receive a grade lower than C. The data in my table show the percentage range of
correctly answered questions needed to achieve a particular grade.

So what do these results show and how do the students respond to them?
According to the results published for 1995 by the Joint Council for the GCSE,
3.4 per cent of the students gained the top A*. But to achieve this, our best
students needed merely to achieve a score of 64, or to get fewer than two
questions out of three correct.

I gave the previous year’s exam to my top physics set; half of them wanted to
take the lower paper. Some panicked to such an extent that they could not start
any of the problems. It was only after I explained that they need not achieve a
high percentage to receive an A that they calmed down.

All the examination boards to which I have written lamented the necessity of
setting such difficult exams and have put the blame on the School Curriculum and
Assessment Authority. Of course, I told my students it was the exam board’s
fault. One board claimed that it was: “hoping to improve this situation
gradually and to restore the GCSE philosophy of positive achievement, but we do
of course have to follow the rules laid down by SCAA.” (It is interesting that
two boards mentioned the term “positive achievement”, which is another way of
saying that the student should experience some kind of success.)

In the training of scientists to think and to work independently, each task
must be measured. If the task required is too difficult, ill-conceived or, with
some PhD projects, impossible, the intellectual growth leading to
self-confidence will not occur.

The present system in Britain may give the feeling of success to the top 4
per cent. I believe the majority of students, and I include the moderately
successful, are being turned off by lack of reasonable success and lack of
choice.

There is one point that those who are dead set on high exam standards at any
cost might consider. The majority of students who are being turned off by the
system will be the majority of tax payers and voters of the future. Will they
continue to support scientists and their programmes?